Many contact centers generally address three questions with respect to handling inbound and/or outbound communications, such as telephone calls, short messaging service (“SMS”) messages, multimedia messaging service (“MMS”) messages, Web chats, emails, etc., with remote parties. The first of these questions is what are the best treatments to institute for handling the communications? A treatment is considered a process used to conduct a particular communication. For example, a contact center may define a treatment that involves having telephone calls from remote parties who primarily speak Spanish handled by agents working for the contact center who also primarily speak Spanish.
In many instances, a contact center's objective is to route each communication to a particular treatment that results in maximizing the benefit of the communication to the contact center and/or business for whom the contact center is handling the communication. Typically, a contact center applies some set of criteria and/or associated business rules to select the best treatment for a particular communication. This can be as simple as routing a communication to an agent who speaks the same language as the remote party involved with the communication or as complex as making the use of predictive models in a variety of ways.
Thus, many contact centers are routinely faced with determining what treatments to support and what logic to use to determine which treatment to apply to each communication. The answer to these two inquires varies based on the nature of the business, its products and/or services, and its client/prospect service philosophy.
The second question many contact centers consider with respect to handling communications is how should queues used for holding communications waiting to be serviced be structured and managed to attempt to derive optimal gain for the contact center and/or business? Generally speaking, once a family of treatments is established, some approach to structuring and managing the queues for the different treatments must also be established. For instance, one approach is to have a separate pool of agents dedicated to serving each treatment queue. While another approach is to have a single pool of agents that collectively handles all treatment queues, in effect creating a single queue combining all treatments.
However, the first approach is typically too restrictive in terms of dealing with intermittent phenomena such as agent idle time and random or deterministic call arrival rate surges. While the second approach can reduce the total number of agents needed to service the totality of treatment queues, but tends to degrade quality and effectiveness of service for all treatments. In some instances, a contact center may institute a compromise between the two approaches to attempt to capture the strong points of both. For example, one method is to give each agent a primary assignment to handle only calls for a specific treatment, but allows agents who are trained to handle more than one treatment to divert from their primary assignment under special circumstances such as when they become idle or when other treatment queues have temporary surges in demand.
Finally, the third question many contact centers consider with respect to handling communications is how should agent staff be trained and assigned to individual queues to support chosen business goals while minimizing cost? Therefore, some systematic process is needed for hiring and training agents, and that process needs to support the selected family of treatments and the chosen approach to queue management. Due to agent attrition and changes in overall communication volumes, it is generally necessary to hire, train, and lay off agents on an ongoing basis, while striving to retain and further develop highly productive members of the staff. After preliminary steps such as formal courses and shadowing of experienced agents, training has to transition to actual handling of communications. Ideally there would be some process for routing more routine communications, or communications that are deemed of less importance, to agents who are in training or who are less experienced. Another important goal is to reduce overall staff levels without significant degradation of response times or service quality, at least for parties who contribute materially to the stability and/or growth of the business.
Therefore, a need in the art exists that would facilitate contact centers in better addressing questions two and three once the contact centers have decided on which treatments to support has been defined. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure herein is presented.